Revolutionary Communist International
A critical analysis from the Global South
The Revolutionary Communist International (RCI) has an organized presence in more than seventy countries, particularly in Western Europe and North America. It strives to awaken revolutionary consciousness among workers and youth, seeking the overthrow of capitalism. It declares in its Website, “we are fighting to build a single, global party of world socialist revolution, based on the scientific, revolutionary communist ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.”
RCI approved a manifesto in June 2024. I devote today’s commentary to critical analysis of the Manifesto. In contrast to the confusions and divisive notions of the so-called Left, the Manifesto is on target on several key questions. Nevertheless, when analyzed from the perspective of the Global South, it is seriously flawed.
The Manifesto expresses the fundamentally important role of leadership. In triumphant revolutionary processes, exceptional leaders educated the people, bringing them to an understanding of the systemic sources of the problems that the nation confronts and of the goals and objectives of the working-class movement. To this end, they established organizations, which enable intelligent and unified political action by and for the working class. The Manifesto declares that the revolutionary party is the highest expression of proletarian organization, unifying the workers in the necessary task of the overthrow of capitalism.
The Manifesto stresses that the lack of leadership in Europe and the USA has retarded the process of socialist transformation in the West. Many leftist politicians and labor leaders have been reformists who do not ground their proposals in a scientific analysis of capitalism and who capitulate to the pressures of the bourgeoisie at critical moments.
The Manifesto recognizes that, in the current conditions of capitalism, there are many forms of oppression, and the communists of RCI “are opposed to oppression and discrimination of any sort, whether it be directed against women, people of colour, gay people, transgender people or any other oppressed group or minority.” However, the RCI is opposed to ideas and practices in supposed defense of the rights of said groups that undermine the unity of the working class. “We utterly reject identity politics, which, under the guise of defending the rights of a particular group, plays a reactionary and divisive role that ultimately weakens the unity of the working class and provides invaluable assistance to the ruling class.” The Manifesto considers identity politics to have emerged from post-modernism and other ideas of the “left” petty bourgeoisie of the universities. Such ideas are alien to the working-class struggle, and they have provoked confusion and division among workers and students. “The struggle against this alien class ideology and its petty-bourgeois advocates therefore constitutes a very important task.”
The Manifesto stresses that the goal of the RCI is to win over the most advanced and class-conscious of the masses to the road of socialist revolution, with awareness that the new generation of workers and youth are alienated from the greed and corruption of capitalism. This task cannot be accomplished by bombarding the people with revolutionary slogans, which is inadequate and sometimes counterproductive. As Lenin taught, the necessary road is patient explanation, putting forth and disseminating mature interpretations of great events.
The Revolutionary Communist International is aware that bourgeois democracy is a façade, “behind which lies the reality of the dictatorship of the banks and big corporations.” Bourgeois democracy functions by granting concessions to the working class, but the façade is exposed “to the degree that the ruling class is unable to grant concessions to the masses,” as is happening in our times. The declining capacity of capitalism to respond to the demands of the workers creates a situation in which there could be a sharp change in consciousness, if a serious alternative to capitalism were to be presented to the people.
Marshalling the possibilities inherent in the current situation is precisely the purpose of the Revolutionary Communist International. It seeks to build a single, worldwide party of socialist revolution, rooted in the scientific and revolutionary communist ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
In the formulation of these concepts, the Revolutionary Communist International is essentially correct, (although its formulation of “the overthrow of capitalism” is vague and unnecessarily provocative). It correctly sees the need for a vanguard political party that strives to understand the structural sources of social problems and that patiently explains to the people the concrete steps necessary for the transformation of their political and social reality, intelligently responding to the demands of the people. To the extent that the party correctly understands, it attains the support of the people, enabling it to take political power in bourgeois states and to undertake the day-by-day concrete task of socialist construction, in accordance with the particular conditions of each nation.
However, there are considerable oversights in the Manifesto of the Revolutionary Communist International, and they begin with its interpretation of Lenin. The great Russian revolutionary leader discerned the complementarity of the Russian Revolution and the proletarian revolutions of the West, seeing the triumph of the latter as indispensable to the socialist transformation of Russia. When he saw that the proletarian revolutions of the West were not going to triumph in the aftermath of the Great War, he projected that the epicenter of the worldwide proletarian revolution would pass to the East. As the Cuban political scientist and philosopher Thalía Fung has stressed, Lenin understood that this implied a reconstruction of Marxism from the colonial situation, inasmuch as China was enduring conditions of semi-colonialism in the aftermath of Western military and economic penetration (forcing the “unequal treaties”), and Indochina was by the time of Lenin under French colonial domination. In China and Indochina, significant anti-colonial movements had already begun in Lenin’s time.
What emerged in the reconstruction of Marxism from the colonial situation was the concept of the complementary struggles of a single worldwide revolution, with the revolutions by the colonized, on the one side, and the proletarian revolutions of the West, on the other.
The notion of a complementary worldwide revolution of two dimensions was most clearly expressed by Ho Chi Minh. Ho, then known as Nguyen Tat Thanh (the name given to him by his father, meaning “he who will succeed”), was socialized as a child and adolescent in the environment of the anti-colonial nationalist movement formed by Vietnam’s Confucian scholar-gentry class. When Nguyen arrived in Paris in 1917 at the age of 27, he immediately became politically active in the city’s significant Vietnamese émigré community, and he began to attend meetings of the French Socialist Party, which was divided ideologically between social democracy and the communism of Lenin. As he encountered this debate, Nguyen learned of Lenin’s “Thesis on the National and Colonial Question,” which, by virtue of its affirmation of the importance of the national liberation struggles in the colonies, converted Nguyen into a Leninist.
Lenin’s essay on the colonial question demonstrates an advanced understanding. It explains that the colonies provide markets, land, and raw materials for the Western imperialist powers, thereby providing material benefits that make possible concessions to workers, which are obstacles to the development of workers’ revolutionary consciousness in the Western countries. The essay maintains that the Western proletarian revolution and the anti-colonial revolution of the colonies must unite, forming a global anti-imperialist movement. The independence of the colonies, Lenin maintained, is the first step to the triumph of the proletarian revolution in the West.
Because of the impact of Lenin’s thesis on the colonial question on his intellectual development, Ho Chi Minh joined with those members of the French Socialist Party who voted on December 29, 1920, to form the French Communist Party and to affiliate with Lenin’s Third International. And he subsequently became a part of the international communist movement, headquartered in Moscow. He did so as a true delegate of the colonized peoples, challenging the international communist movement to fulfill in practice Lenin’s thesis on the colonial question. His writings and activities from 1921 to 1924 strove to bring the international communist movement to a more advanced stage of genuine internationalism, moving it beyond a context defined by the movements of Western and Eastern Europe.
Addressing the Fifth Congress of the Communist International on June 23, 1924, Ho, who had by then taken the name Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot), asserted:
I am here in order to continuously remind the International of the existence of the colonies. . .. It seems to me that the comrades do not entirely comprehend the fact that the fate of the world proletariat, and especially the fate of the proletarian class in aggressive countries that have invaded colonies, is closely tied to the fate of the oppressed peoples of the colonies. . ..
You all know that today the poison and life energy of the capitalist snake is concentrated more in the colonies than in the mother countries. The colonies supply the raw materials for industry. The colonies supply soldiers for the armies. . .. Yet in your discussions of the revolution you neglect to talk about the colonies. . .. Why do you neglect the colonies, while capitalism uses them to support itself, defend itself, and fight you?
In Nguyen the Patriot’s “Report on the National and Colonial Questions” at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International as well as other writings of 1924, he was critical of the communist parties of the West for lacking contact with the colonized peoples and for ignoring the colonial question, thus not following in practice the theory of Lenin on the colonial question. He maintained that the communists of the West were trying to kill the capitalist snake by stepping on its tail.
In accordance with his emerging synthetic understanding, Nguyen saw domination in Vietnam as having a double axis of colonial domination and class exploitation. He believed that the full liberation of the people of Vietnam would require not only political independence from French colonial domination, but also the liberation of peasants from class exploitation by traditional Vietnamese and colonial French landholders. He understood that Third World nationalism alone, without communism, would not liberate the colonized peasant. And he discerned that peasants, while possessing an orientation toward spontaneous rebellion, were unaware of the communist understanding of history and class struggle; and therefore, the peasants needed to be organized, educated, and led to form an effective struggle. He saw the need to disseminate the ideas of communism among the peasants, workers, students, intellectuals, and merchants of the colonies.
At the same time, Nguyen grasped that the workers of the West also needed to be educated beyond what they could understand from their direct experience. He saw the need to educate Western workers and the Western communist parties on the importance of encounter, engagement, and alliance with the anti-colonial struggles in the colonies, as a necessary condition for attaining their own liberation from capitalist exploitation.
From 1925 to 1945, Nguyen was the leading figure in the development of the Indochinese Communist Party, taking the name Ho Chi Minh in 1942, and in leading the people of Vietnam to a Declaration of Independence from French colonial rule in 1945. During this stage of struggle, Ho Chi Minh advocated the forging of a global revolution through complementary movements of workers in the West and national liberation in the colonized regions, working on a basis of alliance, solidarity, and mutual support.
Ho always presented himself as a disciple of Lenin, and he was. But he reformulated Lenin’s insights in accordance with the colonial situation of Vietnam. Whereas Lenin envisioned a proletarian vanguard, Ho developed a vanguard consisting of enlightened intellectuals, peasants, and workers. Whereas Lenin distrusted the peasant as susceptible to bourgeois thinking, Ho discerned the revolutionary spontaneity of the peasant. Whereas Lenin experienced the betrayal of the revolution by petty bourgeois socialists, Ho experienced the central role of the Confucian scholar-gentry class in the origin and development of Vietnamese revolutionary nationalism. Whereas Lenin saw patriotism as an instrument of the bourgeoisie in manipulating the working class into participating in imperialist wars, Ho saw genuine Vietnamese patriotism as a necessary component of the struggle against colonial domination.
In adapting Lenin to the colonial situation of Vietnam, Ho was following the recommendations of Lenin himself. In his message to the communist organizations of the East, Lenin asserted, “Relying upon the general theory and practice of communism, you must adapt yourself to specific conditions such as do not exist in the European countries. You must be able to apply that theory and practice to conditions in which the bulk of the population are peasants, and in which the task is to wage a struggle against medieval survivals and not against capitalism.”
Ho’s creative synthesis of Marxism-Leninism and a Third World anti-colonial perspective was appreciated by Fidel Castro, who also formulated a synthesis of Third World nationalism and Marxism-Leninism in the practical context of revolutionary struggle. In an address in Vietnam on September 12, 1973, four years after Ho’s death, Fidel declared:
President Ho Chi Minh, understanding the extraordinary historic importance and the consequences of the glorious October Revolution, and assimilating the brilliant thought of Lenin, saw with complete clarity that in Marxism-Leninism there was the teaching and the road that ought to be followed in order to find the solution to the problem of the peoples oppressed by colonialism.
Comrade Ho Chi Minh, in a brilliant manner, combined the struggle for national independence with the struggle for the rights of the masses oppressed by the exploiters and the feudalists. He saw that the road was the combination of the patriotic sentiments of the peoples with the need for liberation from social exploitation.
National liberation and social liberation were the two pillars on which his doctrine was built. But he saw, in addition, that the countries that had fallen behind due to colonialism were able to leap forward in history and construct their economy through socialist paths, sparing themselves from the sacrifices and the horrors of capitalism. . ..
Comrade Ho Chi Minh knew how to adapt brilliantly the eternal principles of Marxism-Leninism to the concrete conditions of Vietnam. History has shown that he was right, because in no other manner would a people have been able to write a page as heroic and glorious as that written by the people of Vietnam, overthrowing first French colonialism and then Yankee imperialism.
From the complementary struggles of the proletarian revolutions of the West and the anti-colonial revolutions of the Global South, an understanding would emerge of a double axis of oppression, involving capitalist exploitation alongside colonial domination. Human freedom requires not only transformation of the capitalist world-economy, but also transformation of the neocolonial world-system. The complementary dynamics of oppression are intertwined, in that European colonialism provided the foundation for the dynamic growth of modern capitalism and modern technology.
Insight into the interconnectivity and complementarity of the West and the South leads us to forms of investigation that make clear several dynamics relevant to the current world situation, such as the factors that explain the spectacular ascent of the United States of America from the end of the eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries. Such explanatory factors include: the conquest of indigenous nations and peoples of North America as well as Mexico, providing the material base for economic expansion; the lucrative trading relation of New England and Mid-Atlantic farmers and merchants with slave plantations in the Caribbean, enabling capital accumulation by US farmers and merchants; the territorial and economic expansion of the world-economy during the nineteenth century, converting the US South into exporters of cotton, tobacco, and sugar, on a foundation of African slave labor; the conversion of capital accumulated through the West Indian trade into industrial development in the northeastern United States, taking advantage of new trade opportunities resulting from the development of exportation plantations in the US South; the concentration of industry during the second half of the twentieth century, driven by the “robber barons,” establishing the corporation as a powerful force in the nation and the world; imperialist policies with respect to Latin America and the Caribbean beginning in 1898, making possible access to markets, raw materials, and cheap labor; the accumulation of profits in war-related industries during the two world wars of the twentieth century; and the post-World War II conversion to a permanent military economy, justified by the Cold War ideology, leading to the consolidation of a military-industrial complex.
Understanding the dynamics of the spectacular US ascent is central to understanding the current structural crisis of the world-system. The dynamics of the US expansion, or anything approximating them, are no longer available to the United States, or any other nation. The geographical and ecological limits of the earth have been reached and overextended, such that there are no new lands and peoples to conquer and submit to superexploited and forced labor. In addition, the colonized peoples are organized, capable of resisting and making more costly the imposition of new forms of imperialism. In this new situation, the only possible road to further economic development is the creative development of new forms of mutually beneficial trade among all nations, rich and poor, strong and weak. Cooperation for common development is the only possible constructive resolution of the problem of colonial domination.
However, the North American and European elites did not have the capacity to discern this fundamental truth with respect to the world situation. When the signs of crisis were becoming increasingly evident during the late 1960s and 1970s, the Western elites turned to more aggressive forms of imperialism, even though evolving conditions had rendered outdated imperialism in any form. This was a subjective limitation, rooted in the long-standing practice of denying the significance of European colonialism for Western economic development, for purposes of ideological justification.
The USA took the lead in developing more aggressive forms of imperialism, implementing them at a time in which imperialism no longer could have beneficial results. The new stage of outdated, aggressive imperialism has gone through three sub-stages, namely, neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and unconventional war, provoking a host of difficulties that are widely seen as signs of global crisis.
In contrast, the nations of the Global South, observing from the vantage point of the neocolonized, were the first to discern and proclaim the necessary road of mutually beneficial trade in search of common development. The vision was first proclaimed at the Bandung conference of 1955, and it subsequently was given organizational form with the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961. Its proposal for mutually beneficial cooperation among nations was approved in 1974 by the UN General Assembly as a Declaration for a New International Economic Order. Although the Non-Aligned Movement was hijacked in the 1980s by Asian allies of Western neoliberalism, NAM recovered its anti-imperialist voice during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Today NAM repeatedly proclaims, in the name of its 120 member states that represent the majority of nations and peoples of the world, that a world-system of competing imperialisms is no longer sustainable, and that cooperation and mutually beneficial trade is the necessary road for the common development and prosperity of all. Thus, the Global South today discerns the road to the resolution of the structural crisis of the world-system.
From the perspective of the Global South, the ascent of China is explained by her embracing of a policy of cooperation in foreign policy. China did so in order to resolve its own economic difficulties. Beginning in the 1980s, China’s leadership grasped the need to move beyond its model of centralized state control and toward state direction of a mixed economy, so that Chinese companies would be able to offer to the West possibilities for mutually beneficial trade, enabling the West to move beyond its outdated super-imperialism. This Chinese foreign policy has been consolidated in the twenty-first century by Xi Jinping, as China pursues a policy of South-South cooperation as well as North-South cooperation. In its systemic pursuit of mutually beneficial trade with nations in all regions of the world, China is fueling its own growth, and at the same time is leading the world in the construction of a New International Economic Order, proclaimed by the nations of the Global South in 1974.
The Manifesto of the Revolutionary Communist International does not address these global dynamics. It is like the French communists criticized by Ho Chi Minh in the 1920s, for failing to pay attention to what was going on in the colonies, and failing to appreciate the significance of these developments for the world as a whole.
The Manifesto is largely silent on the efforts to construct socialism in the Global South. It treats China superficially, in spite of its evident importance to the world. It maintains that Russia and China, having entered the capitalist road, have revealed themselves as formidable imperialist powers with a global reach, and have entered into direct conflict with American imperialism. Russia and China, the manifesto maintains, have emerged as powerful rivals to the USA, challenging Washington in a global struggle for markets, spheres of influence, raw materials and profitable investments. The Manifesto’s brief commentaries with respect to China place it at odds with the perspective of the Global South, a fact that the Manifesto does not mention, much less critically engage.
Not knowing the Global South, the Manifesto does not appreciate that dynamics in the South since the 1950s give greater credibility to its own socialist proposal for the expropriation of the means of production and the introduction of socialist planning under worker’s control. As seen from the South, the world is in transition to a world beyond competing imperialisms, a new world order that respects the sovereignty of all nations. In this context, many progressive and socialist movements attain control of governments, and they are cooperating with other governments in the construction of a post-imperialist and post-colonial world order. Seen in this way, the RCI proposal for appropriation of the means of production by workers is in accord with important tendencies in the world today.
If the RCI were capable of constructively engaging and critically analyzing China and the Global South, it would have a more realistic proposal to offer to the peoples of the West, more connected to major events in the world. Such critical and constructive engagement would demonstrate that socialism is not merely an idea that was put forth more than a century ago by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, but an idea that is debated and under development by the peoples of the Global South, in response to the structures of oppression that define their past and current realities.
RCI is trapped in the challenges confronted by Lenin and Trosky, ignoring the ideas put forth by Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel, and Xi Jinping. It must overcome its Eurocentrism, and critically engage the Global South, in order to attain greater credibility.
“I asked about elections in Cuba, and I found a reality beyond the myth of the Cuban dictatorship.”
